2019 Volume 60 Issue 2 Pages 447-454
The received wisdom is that, even after science classes, students’ scientific misconceptions cannot easily be changed to correct conceptions. Many researchers have reported the mechanics conception is one of their misconceptions. The purpose of this study is to reveal what kind of misconceptions lower secondary school students who have completed the lower secondary science curriculum in full in Japan still have, regarding the relation between a body in motion and its energy on a slope. 97 3rd-grade lower secondary school students learned about the relation about 6 months prior to this study. They respond a questionnaire. We obtained the following results: Students have largely assimilated the concept that the more the mass of a body increase, the faster the body drops when it freely drops. They also have repeatedly directly experienced sliding down slides, running downhill, and going down slopes of different angles on a bicycle, and they thereby memorize an image of these experiences, including the sense of the speed change. Thus, they have a misconception that the mass of the body, the slope angle, and the distance the bicycle goes down the slope cause the speed change. Students associate ideas based on recalled their memories, and they hence revive the following three misconceptions: The potential energy of a dynamic cart resting on the slope and the speed when the cart finishes going down the slope depends not on the height of the center of gravity of the cart but on the slope angle; The higher the center of gravity of the same carts resting on the same slope, the stronger the force in the parallel direction to the slope acting on the cart; The shorter the distance the cart resting on the same slope goes down, the stronger the force.
